Well.... thats pretty dumb. lol Good to know though. I stand corrected. I've been looking for an upgrade to USB. Might have just found it. What are the other adjustable frequencies in "pro" mode?

 

Wrong, 880prs will do 3-way active with complete controls of the the tweet mid and woofer. Those settings you have mentioned are only for the 2-way active setup when using a tweet mid and sub. When in 3-way mode you have these options: Low LPF:25-250hz, Mid HPF: 25-250hz, Mid LPF: 1.25khz-12.5khz, High HPF: 1.25khz-12.5khz. These are the slopes available: Low LPF:-12/-36db, Mid HPF: -6/-24db, Mid LPF: -6/-12db, High HPF:-6/-24db. When in 3-way active mode there's no control over subwoofer but can be done by using the output on your 6 channel amp for a signal. When adjusting auto EQ and TA you setup the mic somwehere in your seat preferably on your headrest. You will have 10 sec. to close the door and wait about 5 minutes for the EQ and TA to do their thing. The receiver will send a tone through each speaker for about 10 sec. to set the EQ. Following this, another tone will be sent out through each speaker to calibrate for each speakers TA. It's just a bunch of static really to test your cars acoustics and figure out how far each speaker is from the mic so that the receiver will know how much to delay a particular speaker. Hope this helps to clear things up a bit.

 

I know how the deck works, I have one similar. I just didn't know about the "advanced" mode for 3 way. I'm actually reading the manual right now. On my deck, the Auto T/A is defeatable and you can manually adjust. Can you still do that on this unit? Adjust T/A settings for Tweet/Mid/sub individually L/R in some Custom setting? If so, looks like I found my upgrade.

 

^It can, the prs also has seperate 16 EQ per side.
USB is junk on it apparently and you have to pay extra to get it.

ANy head unit that you want to know about active 3 way or 4 way, you have to download the manual and have a read, the info is rarely on the website for that kind of stuff.

 

I seem to have noticed this.... lol What makes to USB junk?

 

OK lets do a little myth cleaning here: TA can be, and usually is, bad for the 2 seat vehicle, why is that? Because it is usually done by someone sitting in the drivers seat. After reading and rereading vwdublu posts I am figuring out some of his points (really try being more direct,).

here is one of his points:
Can TA help 2 seat listening... yes by using TA to effectively move speakers till they exist in the same time, not from either seat but by aligning the Mid to the tweeter and the Midbass to the mid-tweet combo. alight the left side drivers to each other and then align the right side drivers to each other.
My commentary:
Now will this give height and center improvements ... yes but not as much as desired. This will improve both seats but it does not compensate for a tweeter or midrange 2 feet from one ear at all. If you do this I would go so far as to say it would be a fairly solid improvement in SQ (and once you hit the EQ the TA has shifted) there aren't any sonic negatives. The only problem is if the speakers aren't already properly positioned by a fully thought out build it wont be 'good enough' and since you have A LOT of TA in the HU controls this is where we start to either 'go 1 seat' or we start to really screw up.

 

edit* It only displays a maximm of 8 characters .... basically it makes it hard to navigate if you have lots of songs\folders.

 

As far as auto EQ or auto TA goes, I have never heard a commercially available car audio automated device do as good a job as a trained ear (Andy W of Harmon has one but it really isn't commercial yet). Frankly they have been serious disappointments as a fire and forget weapon (they may be a good first try though). And vrdublu using your auto EQ/ TA for a preset for 1 seat, then another preset for 2 seat, and so on is not exactly the way you described your systems performance, if you are using the 880 that is what you must have done. Very misleading for me as I was trying to figure out what equipment you were using to have the features you were describing.

most autocal devices do not auto-calibrate for all seats simply for one mic position at a time and even though you said you did, you didn't (you would need to record data from all seats in the vehicle then go through a summing circuit using a complicated algorithm to adjust the output so it aligns well for each seat (only seen it done once)).

As far as Mark Eldridge goes... I am not sure if he does or doesn't use TA as all his toys are hidden and he isn't overly chatty on what he is or isn't doing (and frankly I think it is disrespectful to ask such things), heck sit in his race car and you cant tell what size speakers he uses as everything is hidden. He is no dummy, why would you give away a secret, and he supports his sponsor so he must use his sponsors products. Once you have played this game for a bit you use every tool available and simplify things as much as possible (complexity is a trap).

 

Yes you are right about one thing so far, I didn't calibrate for each seat but for the drivers only, that's all you can do with this deck. I wasn't descriptive enough in this area, and perhaps somewhat misleading. The deck simply guesstemates seat position by where the speaker is, in all other positions other then the calibrated one, it's not perfect but for $300 show me better, and that's what this is all about. The deck seta my EQ to all flat in my 2001 Jetta, I didn't like it (as most people don't like a flat response) and adjusted it according to what I like. BTW: No one's ear is better then what a machine can do, be it for speaker quality or things such as TA/speaker placement, there is no such thing as a trained ear, it's a myth.

 

I have a hard time following you as well John. You say TA is good then you say it can't compensate for the mid 2' away. You say it can't improve height and center of a given soundtrack........Well, it can and it does, that's it's only purpose for existance. You can also use TA without auto EQ and set it yourself. This is not a fix for everything that is car audio, this was already mentioned earlier in the thread. All I can tell you is.....Listen to this deck or something like it, set it up and listen to it. Then go back into your own car without it and tell me it doesn't work or doesn't work that well. Finally: adjusting EQ post TA calibration should not effect TA significantly at all, and as I have said before, it can be manually readjusted to what you thought it was.